Tag: dennis ritchie

Dennis Ritchie died at home this weekend after a long illness. I’m sure every “Unix” and “C” user will miss him.He was the key developer of the Unix and original developer of the C programming language.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist notable for developing C and for having influence on other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

UNIX turns 40 – in 1969 group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna developed UNIX. Today Unix offered in many flavors and developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors (such as IBM, HP, Sun, Apple etc) and non-profit organizations. CW article concluded that after four decades, the future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure in form of Linux and Microsoft NT operating system.